Picture this: you get home from work at the end of a long day. You’re hungry, tired, and want something quick and healthy that doesn’t take too long to prepare.
You look in the fridge, and all you find is a bottle of hot sauce and half a carton of almond milk. Looks like it’s takeout again tonight…
If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Millions of folks who strive to eat a healthy, plant-based diet regularly face the same struggle—one that Divya’s set out to solve.
As an agency whose two co-founders are on plant-based eating journeys and that count health coaches and lifelong vegetarians among the team, we’re big fans of Divya’s mission to “help people find joy, nourishment, and balance through food.”
Divya’s—together, we’d form a more iconic partnership than Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart, so we put together this blog post especially for you.
In it, we lay out the growth blueprint we’d use to design, implement, and scale a multichannel growth strategy for Divya’s.
Take a peek. 👀
The remit: increase sales across Divya’s 3 service lines
Divya’s consists of an award-winning plant-based restaurant in New York’s Lower East Side, a range of good-for-you packaged Ayurvedic meals, and a bestselling recipe book, What to Eat for How You Feel.
These three service lines clearly tie into Divya’s mission to help folk live healthier lives by making Ayurvedic products, ingredients, and wisdom more accessible.
Who (and where) Divya’s customers are
Divya’s audience is made up of health-conscious, busy people who want to eat a balanced, plant-based diet but don’t have a lot of time to buy or prepare ingredients.
They need nutritious food that’s not just convenient—it also has to be tasty.
They are actively engaged with the brand and leave enthusiastic reviews like this one on your website:
Most of Divya’s products—like the Bold Kitchari and Balanced Kitchari single serves—receive five stars and are described by fans as “pantry essentials,” while others say they make them feel “grounded and balanced.”
What more could anyone want from a range of packaged foods?
Once Divya’s products make it to consumers, they love them. The question then becomes: How do we get them to folks faster and within budget?
Beyond the Divya’s website, a quick search on SparkToro revealed that this is a health-conscious audience that uses words like “wellness,” “natural,” and “ayurveda” in social media bios.
Additionally, their top hashtags include “#nutrition,” “#weightloss,” and “#healthyliving,” demonstrating their interest in eating a balanced diet.
Among their most-used phrases are “essential oils,” “yoga poses,” and “natural remedies,” all of which align with or relate to Ayurveda.
These are people who actively engage with health content online—their favorite publications include Yoga Journal, MindBodyGreen, and Well+Good, and they also follow wellness influencers like Dr. Oz and Andrew Weil, MD
We would begin our growth strategy for Divya’s by diving deeper into what makes this audience tick through stakeholder interviews.
During the research phase, we’d uncover more about the places they hang out online, the kind of content they consume, and the messaging that resonates with them.
The 4 proven strategies we’d use to help Divya’s grow
As a 360° digital marketing agency, we’ve helped scale many businesses like yours—take Pepper, a vertical SaaS company revolutionizing the food distribution industry, whose website we redesigned in a record six weeks. Or Grapeseed Media, an ad agency whose digital presence we’ve built from the ground up.
We believe that, like a Greek temple, there are four pillars that support a robust marketing strategy—here’s how we’d apply them to Divya’s.
1. Grab a bigger slice of the organic search pie
Divya’s has seen steady organic growth since early 2022, though keyword coverage and estimated traffic have plateaued since the November 2023 Google Core update.
To get those lines trending upward again, we would employ a robust content marketing and SEO strategy, including:
- Carrying out a keyword gap analysis to identify relevant untapped keywords.
- Analyzing competitor content to close gaps.
- Boosting domain authority with targeted link building and guest post campaigns that establish Divya’s as thought leaders in the space.
- Running a technical SEO audit to make sure the site is discoverable by both humans and search engine crawlers.
- Improving local visibility for the restaurant. According to Semrush, there are 210 searches per month for “plant-based restaurants near me” (New York), with a keyword difficulty of 47, which is achievable. This search has transactional intent, meaning searchers are ready to book:
Targeting this and other similar keywords that New Yorkers in your target audience are searching for will help drive more bookings for the restaurant.
2. Boost ROI with a fine-tuned performance marketing campaign
Divya’s currently runs PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns, and we’d love to apply our proven methods to your strategy to help boost ROI and lower CPC (cost-per-click).
One way to achieve this is to marry Google Ads with blog content targeting high-commercial intent keywords. For instance, the search term ‘hello fresh alternatives’ receives 1,300 searches per month in the US, according to Google Ads Keyword Planner.
This represents a huge opportunity to target people looking for healthy packaged food with both blog content and paid ads that boost reach, build brand awareness, and drive more sales.
3. Take it social
Social media is where food and recipe content comes into its own! Not just because of its obvious visual appeal, but because growing numbers of people are turning to it as a search engine.
Social media is a driving force behind the continued rise of food delivery, and food ordering through social media has grown by 300% in the past decade.
But it’s not just driving volume—it’s shaping the way people eat, and more people than ever are turning to social media to help them eat sustainable, plant-based diets with locally-sourced ingredients.
For instance, 41% of people who adopt plant-based diets do so because of social media pressure, and 49% of Gen Z are embarrassed to order dairy products in front of their friends—pointing to a growing awareness of the benefits of a plant-based lifestyle.
Additionally, 54% of online users resort to locally-sourced food to follow a sustainable diet. However, convenience is also important to them—Americans now consume 31% packaged food, believing it’s faster and easier to prepare than fresh food.
These figures demonstrate the power of social media to influence buying behaviors as well as highlighting the growing demand for healthy, plant-based restaurants, ingredients, and packaged food.
It’s no wonder 82% of restaurants in the US use social media as part of their marketing strategy.
You’re already sharing great content on Facebook and Instagram, so to build your social footprint further, we’d also establish Divya’s presence on TikTok and Pinterest.
These two channels hold a lot of potential for your brand, with new audiences actively seeking out food content and healthy, delicious meals both at home and in New York City.
TikTok is the go-to platform for Gen Z when searching for a recipe, so to reach this audience, we would create short, highly shareable recipe video clips targeting SEO search terms around recipes with high search volume.
This kind of content has some of the highest engagement levels and would help boost Divya’s visibility and brand awareness among a new demographic.
On Pinterest, we’d create a board titled “1,000+ healthy recipes” and populate it with tasty and visually-appealing recipes from your chefs.
We would also run contests across all your social platforms, such as asking followers to submit their favorite healthy recipes for the chance to win a free Divya’s box.
This is a strategy that has worked well for many of our clients—such as Playbook—as it drives authentic engagement and creates user-generated content (UGC) that helps build brand trust and foster deeper connections with your audience.
4. Email marketing and nurture sequences
Email remains one of the most powerful marketing channels—and we’d leverage that to Divya’s advantage.
Firstly, we’d create powerful, story-led magazine-style editorial content for a regular newsletter that will keep your existing audience engaged and loyal to the brand to the point where they become an advocate and start forwarding newsletters to their personal networks.
And we’d love to put automated nurture sequences in place to turn curious browsers into loyal brand advocates and repeat customers.
For example, once a customer has enjoyed a meal at your restaurant, we’d nurture them with recipe content and introduce them to Divya’s packaged offerings, so they can enjoy the taste of Divya’s at home.
5. Brand uplift and website overhaul
Think of your website as your digital shopfront—it will be the first port of call for people looking to learn more about your brand, so first impressions are everything.
From the colors to typography and carefully chosen copy, every detail of your visual identity and website contributes to the overall brand experience.
We would work with you to create a new visual brand that helps you connect with your target audience and inspires them to take action—whether it’s booking a table at the restaurant or ordering ingredients or a copy of the cookbook.
For instance, we love your brand icons, so we would continue to use them across different design assets and your social media channels as you’re already doing.
However, there are several opportunities to elevate your website design to make it more welcoming and accessible and provide a better user experience.
Homepage
The homepage banner could be bigger to display your beautiful product photos in more detail. We’d also slow the speed of the carousel so users have more time to view the pictures and read the name of each product.
We would also adjust the alignment of the navigation bar to bring “Sign In” in line with the rest of the options.
Since this is your homepage, you want it to be welcoming and inviting—just like your restaurant is.
To achieve this, instead of getting straight to the point with the “Featured Products” gallery, we would use creative cooking photos that include the products, giving your homepage a ‘homey’ feel.
Journal
We love that you have a “journal” rather than a “blog”—very on-brand! The combination of recipes and Ayurvedic lifestyle content is a smart SEO play to drive organic traffic and provide opportunities to link to products.
One way to make the posts more visually appealing would be to break up the text with more images and icons.
Typefaces
Overall, the typefaces on your website could use a little TLC. Most of them have similar font weights, and there is very little contrast, contributing to a flat and incoherent feel.
Our professional typography designers would work with you to uncover the best typeface combinations for communicating Divya’s brand personality and provide guidance on how to use them correctly.
On our lowest retainer, after the first 12 months of the engagement, we will have generated hundreds of thousands of new leads, thousands of new customers, and a significant increase in resulting revenue. More broadly, we will have built the foundation to launch Divya’s media arm as a standout brand covering health, wellness, and nutrition within Ayurvedic lifestyles.
At that point, Divya’s will have scaled its digital presence and will be ready to hire an internal marketing team that can build on these foundations and realize your vision for Divya’s.
We’ll even assist you in the hiring process to make sure you get the right team for the job—like we did for MDC.
Let’s grow together: Your 12-month budget at-a-glance
Let’s say you’ve got a budget of roughly ~$600-$750K for the year.
To really bring the refreshed brand to life, you’ll likely want to hire a senior Brand Director to keep everything coherent. No one likes an untamed brand!
Let’s assume that such a senior leader will run you $200K per year. This leaves you with another $400-$550K to play with.
Once that senior role is locked in, you’ll want to execute the vision you build with the new Brand Director. While it’s tempting to layer on lots of senior staff, that’ll leave little to no room for actual execution.
You can exhaust your remaining budget on expensive salaries or you can focus on execution.
In other words, you can’t just staff up with more senior and mid-level staff and expect to have space in the budget for content creation, digital PR, web design, email marketing, and all of the work that needs to be delivered to achieve near-term robust results for Divya’s nascent brand.
(We’ve written about this perennial challenge extensively here.)
It’s important to ask yourself: “Am I truly ready–right now–to wrangle a team of senior to mid-level hires like Creative Content Directors, Fractional Creative Directors, Program Managers, Copywriters, and Designers?”
The answer is quite likely “No”, especially if you’re starting from scratch.
The alternative is growth partnership.
Work with a growth partner (agency) that will do the wrangling with and for you as you build that team over the long-term. This approach helps you scale Divya’s to the point that hiring an in-house team makes more sense (and you’re better equipped to do so).
Remember, the team you hire to build a media arm of your brand from scratch versus the team you hire to take that already-built and high-performing media arm to the next level are two very different teams.
Here’s a quick look at a projected annual budget (after the Brand Director hire) with a focus on execution for long-term growth:
In the above model, we assume you’ve pulled together an agency-led team of experts (similar to strategists, copywriters, and designers listed above) at a much more affordable monthly run rate.
The focus then shifts to strategic, execution-focused goals such as:
- Content Hub: Turning Divya’s into the premier content hub (think blogs, ebooks, videos, podcasts, email nurture sequences, etc.) for Ayurvedic wellness
- Performance Marketing: Integrating performance marketing campaigns into the mix to drive traffic once high-quality content has been pulled together
- Digital PR: Launching a digital PR campaign to build Divya Alter’s personal brand as a leader in Ayurvedic health and nutrition
We’re passionate about what we do and get the best results when we partner with brands that align with the things that matter to us, like Divya’s. Together, we can help you reach more people with the benefits of Ayurvedic food.
If you’re ready to invest in the strategies that will make Divya’s the top Ayurvedic brand in the US—you know where we are.
Get in touch, and let’s grow Divya’s together.
